Prayer and health-seeking beliefs in Ghana: understanding the ‘religious space’ of the urban forest

Few studies have examined the relationship between religiosity and health-seeking belief outcomes in Ghana. Drawing on in-depth interviews and group discussions with informal prayer group members and leaders in Accra, Ghana, the study explores participants’ conceptions of illnesses and the significance of the forest as a place of gathering and healing. There are several reasons why prayer group members in this study make their way to the forest, including finding a serene sacred space in a crowded city to confront the vicissitudes of life. Disease, for the prayer group members, is seen to hold both spiritual and physical origins, inspiring them to seek both biomedical and spiritual forms of care. Interviewees believed hospitals could help with physical diseases, but saw spiritual diseases as requiring spiritual solutions. There was a salient differentiation expressed between treatment and healing, however: doctors can treat certain conditions, but only God heals. While there is a need for public health practitioners to better engage spiritual/religious leaders and their followers with mainstream biomedicine, and to challenge some of their misconceptions and mistrust, attending to and understanding the role of religious beliefs, and religious spaces, in everyday conceptions of health, would strengthen the promotion of both men’s and women’s health in this context.